Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) (5 page)

The Celts, like all humans, have seen analogues for their values and themselves in their fellow mortals, feathered, furred and finned. The impulse to view the hawk as embodying the predatory motive in humans, or the fox as incarnating the wily, is hardly unique to any culture. In the oral traditions recorded in Celtic countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, virtually every creature found in Europe is assigned some human attribute or value to enrich a narrative. In many instances a hare or a cow in a Breton or Scottish Gaelic story is no different from counterparts in other European languages. Yet in other instances, such as those concerning the crane, the boar or the salmon, we can see echoes from the earliest materials: animals carved on Iron Age altars, or figures of zoomorphic gods, where animal characteristics are given to human forms. Even in ancient culture, though, not every representation is of the same value; some are divine or totemistic, others merely decorative. Our intention here is to single out the birds, animals and fish who appear continuously over the centuries.

From the earliest times, even the proto-Celtic Urnfield period,
c
.1500–800
BC
, Celtic art shows a marked preference for water birds of different kinds. A cormorant appears to be drawing a chariot holding the sun. Other water birds pull a chariot in which idols are seated. Ducks are shown beside a solar wheel or forming the prow and stern of a boat carrying the sun-disc. Swans and cygnets, together with the non-aquatic ravens, decorate a horse-prod or flesh fork from Iron Age Ireland, found at Dunaverney. Some commentators see in these examples associations with a cult of the sun in its healing powers.

More significant are the long-legged wading birds, the egret and the crane, which can resemble one another in badly worn 3,000-year-old icons. The egret, distinguished by long white tail-feathers, appears in Urnfield icons and most prominently in triplet form at a temple of the Gaulish god Esus. A common pairing puts an egret on the back of a bull, an important cult animal, as we shall see. But the egret does not survive so visibly in later vernacular tradition.

Known in Irish as the
corrbolg
, the crane bag is at once one of the most mysterious and most commented-upon artefacts in early Irish tradition. Two heroes were thought to have owned it at different times: Lug Lámfhota and Fionn mac Cumhaill. Some modern commentators see the crane bag as part of an origin myth of language and consequently of poetry. Initially Manannán filled the crane bag with items peculiarly precious to him: his own knife and shirt, the king of Scotland’s shears, the king of Lochlainn’s helmet, the bones of Assal’s swine and the girdle of the great whale’s back. The substance and contents of the bag imply to some modern readers that it should also have contained the letters of the ogham alphabet. Used for inscriptions before the introduction of Christianity, ogham employs stick-like ciphers, each of them the counterpart of a letter of the Roman alphabet, as suggested by the legs of flying cranes. This association of the crane and the crane bag with writing became more widely known during the era of the influential Irish literary journal,
The Crane Bag
, 1977–81, which reprinted the story in each issue.

The crane is not always benign, however. In ancient belief, those cranes who were not transformed humans were thought stingy and disagreeable. A soldier passing such a crane on his way to battle was doomed. Linked with this perception is the medieval Irish portrait of
glám dícenn
[poet’s execration]. A poet used this as a verbal weapon of war, by standing like a crane on one leg, with one eye closed and one arm extended. A victim of
glám dícenn
might have his face blistered or lose his life.

The swan, a symbol of beauty, good luck, and travel to a world beyond the physical, appears even more frequently than the crane in both ancient culture and later narrative tradition. Somewhat contradictorily, the swan may represent both purity and sexual energy, the latter based on its long, phallic neck and observed proclivity for frequent coitus. Again found in Urnfield and Hallstatt (800–600
BC
) cultures, the swan is represented in art surviving all over Europe. Swans draw a wheeled cauldron (seventh–sixth centuries
BC
) found at Orastie, Romania. At Alésia in eastern France, three mothers appear in a sculpture with three children, while a fourth child is seated in a boat and accompanied by a swan.

The best-known Irish swan narrative is
Oidheadh Chlainne Lir
[The Tragic Story of the Children of Lir] in which the four fostered children, Áed, Finnguala, Fiachra and Conn, are put under a spell by their cruel stepmother Aífe. They must live as swans in three exiles, each of 300 years’ duration. In other Irish literary cycles, a flock of destructive swans ravages the area around Emain Macha, Co. Armagh, at the time of the hero Cúchulainn’s conception. These swans wear chains of gold and silver, as does Cáer Ibormeith, beloved of Angus Óg in
Aislinge Oenguso
[The Dream of Angus], when she is metamorphosed into a swan. Men as well as women may in these tales take swan form, as Mongán of the Irish Cycles of the Kings does. So does the otherworldly Midir in the third part of the ninth-century Irish story,
Tochmarc Étaíne
[The Wooing of Étaín], after he wins an amorous embrace from the beautiful Étaín and takes swan form to fly through the smoke hole in the roof.

Deification and personification of the boar would follow. A Gaulish god named Moccus, equated by the Romans with Mercury, epitomized the power of the boar. Yet there was also a Romano-Gaulish sow deity named Arduinna, associated with the Ardennes Forest. Neither of these attracted huge cults and both seem pale compared to the boar figures in vernacular tradition, even in Ireland where the boar became extinct as early as the twelfth century. An encounter with a boar kills the hero of the Irish Fenian Cycle, Diarmait Ua Duibne, an episode echoing Adonis’s fatal boar hunt in classical mythology. Diarmait’s boar is his own half-brother; Diarmait’s father Donn had killed a bastard son whose spirit was transformed into the animal. Orc Triath was an otherworldly boar or pig in Irish tradition; and the similar-sounding Torc Triath was king of the boars in the pseudo-history
Lebor Gabála
[Book of Invasions]. Elsewhere in the
Lebor Gabála
, the purported narrator of the story, the survivor Tuan mac Cairill, who tells of the different invasions to St Finnian of Moville, is transformed into a boar, among other things. Otherworldly boars are found as well in Welsh tradition under the name of Twrch Trwyth and in Brittany as Tourtain. Boars are also featured prominently in the
Mabinogi
, the exemplar of medieval Welsh literature. In the third branch,
Manawydan
, a gleaming white boar leads Pryderi, the blameless hero who appears in all four branches, into an enclosure from which he cannot escape. In the fourth branch,
Math
, the magician Gwydion takes the form of a boar and his brother Gilfaethwy a sow so that together they may produce the tall piglet, Hychdwn Hir.

Both the stag and the hornless deer, stag or doe, were important cult animals. As monarch of the northern forests, the stag was admired for its speed, grace and sexual prowess during the rutting season. Shed in autumn and growing again in spring, the antlers re-enact the growing season. Their hardness evokes erect male genitalia; carved antlers were used to make phallic amulets. Carvings in the Camonica Valley of the Italian Alps link the stag with sun imagery. In early Irish tradition stags might also be associated with women. Flidais, the Diana-like early goddess of wild things, is also mistress of stags. The war-goddess Mórrígan might also take the form of the stag. In Gaelic Scotland, where deer were and continue to be prevalent, there are indications of deer worship in the Lochaber region. The
sianach
is a deer-monster in Scottish Gaelic oral tradition.

In early Irish and Welsh narratives, deer appear most often in two modes, as enticers of mortals to the otherworld and as transformed beings. The great Irish hero Fionn mac Cumhaill often hunts an enchanted stag who is the metamorphosed god Donn. With the coming of Christianity, the stag became a guide for souls seeking heaven and was so represented in cemeteries. As for transformation, both mortals and fairies might become deer, willingly or unwillingly. One Irish story depicts a jealous woman turning one hundred girls into deer. Perhaps the strangest of these transformations comes in a poem attributed to St Patrick (fifth century) titled in English ‘The Deer’s Cry’ or ‘St Patrick’s Breastplate’. The saint uses a power called
féth fíada
to turn himself and a companion named Benén into wild deer so that they may escape ambush while on their way to evangelize Tara, the royal hill in the Boyne Valley. Their adversaries see only a deer with a fawn.

Some fawns, on the other hand, may be warlike, like the Irish Fenian hero Oisín, the principal son of Fionn mac Cumhaill. To conceive him, Fionn sleeps with the deer-woman, Sadb, thus explaining Oisín’s name, the diminutive of
os
[deer], meaning ‘little deer’ or fawn. Within the bulk of Fenian narratives the character of Oisín manifests no hints of zoomorphism, but in later tales he is the one invited to enjoy a 300-year love affair with a beautiful damsel, Niam, in the otherworld, as in Micheál Coimín’s
Laoi Oisín i dTír na nÓg
[The Lay of Oisín in the Land of Youth],
c
. 1750. The persona of Oisín was also the basis for James Macpherson’s creation Ossian in the
Poems of Ossian
(1760–63).

The name of the horse goddess Epona has long had a certain cachet and is likely to be among the first a beginning reader would encounter in discussions of the Celtic world. That arises in part from her popular but unsupported association with the superb Uffington White Horse in Oxfordshire, one of the earth’s largest pictorial works of art. With a distinctive taut, curvilinear style, the figure, 364 ft long, was cut through the sod to the underlying layer of white chalk about 50
BC
. Unfortunately, surviving evidence suggests that the cult of Epona did not arrive in Britain until after the coming of the Romans almost 100 years later in
AD
43. Epona’s cult originated in eastern Gaul near Alésia prior to its spread to Britain; inscriptions and statues commemorating her are more numerous than for any other goddess. She is usually shown on horseback, sometimes sidesaddle, often clothed but occasionally nude and nymphlike. Her name is sometimes given in plural form, Eponabus, perhaps explained by the triplication of her form as found at Hogonange in the Moselle Valley. Roman commentators noted her popularity with the cavalry, who erected her statue in stables. She was the only Celtic deity ever placed in the Roman pantheon, where she was remembered on 18 December.